HEXUS.bang4buck
In a rough-and-ready assessment of the cards' bang per buck, we've aggregated the 1,680x1,050 frame-rates for five games, normalised them* and taken account of the cards' prices.
But there are more provisos than we'd care to shake a stick at. We could have chosen five different games, the cards' prices could have been derived from other sources and pricing tends to fluctuate daily, especially for new cards.
Consequently, the table, below, highlights a metric that should only be used as a yardstick for evaluating comparative performance with price factored in. Other architectural benefits are not covered, obviously.
| Graphics cards | Sapphire Radeon HD 4730 512MB | Sapphire Radeon HD 4770 512MB | Sapphire Radeon HD 4830 512MB | Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 512MB | Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 512MB | XFX GeForce 9600 GT 512MB | Palit GeForce 9800 GT 512MB |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Actual aggregate marks at 1,680x1,050 | 303.44 | 358.48 | 314.85 | 357.55 | 443.05 | 243.36 | 308.86 |
| Aggregate marks, normalised*, at 1,680x1,050 | 294.25 |
329.24 |
302.57 |
328.78 |
371.53 |
215.04 |
299.66 |
| Current pricing, including VAT | £58.99 | £80 (hard to find in stock) | £70
(discontinued) |
£80 | £98 | £60 |
£75 |
| HEXUS.bang4buck score at 1,680x1,050 | 4.99 |
4.116 |
4.322 |
4.110 |
3.791 |
3.584 |
3.995 |
* the normalisation refers to taking playable frame rate into account. Should a card benchmark at over 60 frames per second in any one game, the extra fps count as half. Similarly, should a card benchmark lower, say at 40fps, we deduct half the difference from its average frame rate and the desired 60fps, giving it a HEXUS.bang4buck score of 30 marks. The minimum allowable frame rate is 20fps but that scores zero.
The HEXUS.bang4buck score only takes the performance and price into account, of course.Analysis
The very keen pricing makes the HD 4730 512MB look good here but no card is a stinker. Bear in mind that if playing with decent degrees of AA/AF the card may not perform quite as well.
